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The purpose of this paper is to investigate public disclosures and accountability for government decision-making in the case of a major prison project delivered through a Public–Private Partnership (PPP) in the State of Victoria (Australia).

The study explores a unique case to provide insights into public disclosures for PPPs in a jurisdiction that is a recognised leader in PPP policy and practice. The analysis is theoretically framed by an understanding of neoliberalism and New Public Management, and draws on data from case-specific reporting, media reporting and public policy, to examine interconnections between accounting, public discourse and accountability.

The analysis shows how publicly available information relating to key government decisions routinely lacked supporting evidence or explanation, even though areas of subjectivity were recognised in public policy. Accounting was deployed numerically and discursively to present potentially contestable decisions as being based on common-sense “facts”. The implied “truth” status of government reporting is problematised by media disclosure of key issues absent from government disclosures.

Under neoliberalism, accountingisation can help depoliticise the public sphere and limit discourse by constructing ostensible “facts” in an inherently contestable arena. By contrast, democratic accountability requires public disclosures that infuse a critical dialogical public sphere.

The paper shows how neoliberalism can be embedded in public policies and institutional practices, and buttressed by the use of accounting. The analysis illuminates the persistence and “failing forward” character of neoliberalism, whereby crises are addressed through further neoliberalisation.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

This study aims to identify and outline the critical challenges affecting the inclination of executives to use data as the basis for making decisions at a local government level.

The study conducted in-depth interviews with 21 public officials comprising middle- and top-level executives from 18 agencies and offices at the Bojonegoro Regency, one of Indonesia’s most progressive regencies in pursuing open government and smart cities.

The findings demonstrate that ensuring a good quality data architecture, nurturing data culture and developing analytics capability are essential in the case of a developing country such as Indonesia. However, insufficient policies and regulations, a nonexistent evaluative framework for data quality, disruptive local tradition and the ingrained autocratic administration represent significant and unique challenges to implementing data-driven decision-making in the local government in Indonesia.

The chosen research approach may result in a need for more generalizability beyond Indonesia, accentuating the necessity for the geographical objects to include other developing countries in future research.

The findings showcase that lack of awareness and acceptance from public officials and the general public of the importance of a data-driven approach; as such, a better understanding of the change in attitudes and mindsets of public officials is invariably one of the critical practical determinants.

The findings signify the importance of creating robust accountability systems and evaluative frameworks that consider the many variables influencing decisions that capture the significance of organizational and local culture.

Recognition that not every climate adaptation policy is a good one has shifted attention to new tools and methods to measure the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation policies. This study aims to propose and apply and applies an innovative adaptation policy assessment framework to identify the extent to which climate adaptation policies in Vietnam exhibit conditions that are likely to ensure a sufficient, credible and effective adaptation.

In total, 21 conditions, categorized under five normative principles and covering critical issue areas in adaptation domain, form the climate adaptation policy assessment framework. The principles were double-checked and tested in case studies through observations and analyses of policy documents to ensure that each condition should be distinct and not overlapping across principles. To see if the principles and attendant conditions were able to capture all relevant aspects of adaptation, the authors used structured expert judgment. In total, 39 policy documents pertaining to climate change adaptation were selected for qualitative document analysis. In-depth interviews with local officials and experts were conducted to address data gaps.

The study reveals major weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation policies in Vietnam since several critical conditions were underrepresented. These results shed new light on why some adaptation policies falter or are posing adverse impacts. The findings suggest that a sound policy assessment framework can provide evidence on what effective adaptation policy looks like and how it can be enabled. The framework for climate adaptation policy assessment in this study can be easily adjusted and used for different socio-environmental contexts in which new conditions for policy assessment might emerge.

The findings show underlying weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation regime in Vietnam. In the absence of mechanisms and measures for accountability and transparency in policy processes, adaptation in Vietnam appears more likely to be prone to maladaptation and corruption. While solving these problems will not be easy for Vietnam, the government needs to evaluate whether the short-term gains in sustaining the existing adaptation policies really make progress and serve its long-term climate-adaptive development goals.

Although interpretations of adaptation effectiveness may be very divergent in different normative views on adaptation outcomes, the authors argue that a common, agreed-upon effectiveness can be reached if it is clearly defined and measurable in adaptation policies. Thus, the climate adaptation policy assessment framework proposed in this study is critical for policymakers, practitioners, donors and stakeholders dealing with adaptation to better understand the weaknesses in policymaking processes, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely prevent or prepare for possible adverse impacts of policies.

This study investigated the micro–macro link in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) sector, specifically considering whether the gender diversity, independence and board attendance rates of H&T firms' boards, alongside the moderation effect of board policies, played a significant role in tourism sector performance.

The 2011–2018 data were retrieved from the World Bank and the Thomson Reuters Eikon databases, and fixed effects panel regression was conducted.

While female directors were a significant driver of tourism sector performance in terms of tourist arrivals and tourism receipts, independent directors were effective in improving tourist arrivals only. Furthermore, moderation analyses demonstrated the inefficacy of board policies in enhancing these directors' contributions to the sector's development. Moreover, the findings revealed the inefficiency of board meetings.

Concerning the efficacy of board policies, the results suggest that firms' boards should review and revise their policies. Surprisingly, while board-diversity policies made no difference to female directors' role in the sector's development (although females were influential), board-independence policies produced unexpected results. In the absence of a board-independence policy, independent directors are influential, but if a policy exists, they are not.

Although prior firm-level studies tested whether board characteristics enhanced firms' performance in the H&T sector, they did not investigate whether board characteristics promoted tourism sector performance. Moreover, the moderating effect of board policies on boards' structures and tourism sector performance has not yet been examined.

The COVID19 crisis has thrown wide open the debate on Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union’s (EMU) future. Next Generation EU (NGEU) has broken the stalemate over a central fiscal capacity. The open question is whether NGEU is a one-off or a first step. The suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact has given new urgency to the debate on reforming EMU’s fiscal rules.

There is no debate as yet about how these two prospects relate to each other. This paper argues that a permanent fiscal capacity and revised rules should be seen as alternatives.

This study makes two claims: first, a fiscal capacity renders a reformed pact unnecessary and second, that is an optimal solution politically. A fiscal capacity would provide an efficient asymmetric shock absorber and therefore reduce the need for pre-emptive action against negative cross-border externalities. It would also provide an abundant supply of an EU-wide safe asset around which to structure the EU’s financial system, thus rendering unnecessary the backstopping of member states' debts.

This would restore democratic accountability while eliminating moral hazard and enforcement problems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social acceptance of renewable and non-renewable energies in Iran using the social acceptance pyramid.

Today, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals. Low acceptance will make it difficult to achieve energy development goals; therefore, social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. Firstly, the model criteria, using data obtained from questionnaires, are weighted by the Shannon entropy method and, finally, four sources of fossil, nuclear, wind and solar energy were ranked by means of VIKOR, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).

The results show that, in Iran, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance. The results of the ranking of options based on multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings.

This research contributes to the literature in two ways: Firstly, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals; thus social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. The results of the ranking of options based on MCDM techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings. Also, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance in Iran.